Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Is Israel Being Alinskyed or Greenberg-Carvilled?

UPDATING 9-8-2011 at bottomAnti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

When fascism comes to America, it will becalled anti-fascism. Huey Long

Stanley Greenberg is the brains behind the current Israeli "social protest." This has emerged through a recent report by Israeli investigative journalist, Kalman Libeskind of Ma`ariv [כאן], and was suggested in an opinion piece by Dror Eyder in Yisrael haYom about six weeks ago [7-29-2011; weekend supplement, p7]. Greenberg is a pollster and political strategist close to the Clinton White House, less so to Obama. His PR and political strategy firm took part in giving BP a clean, "green" ["environmentally friendly"] image, even winning over eco organizations, whereas BP in fact was less concerned about safety violations in its quest for profits than were other oil companies. It was BP that did much to cause last year's offshore oil platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico which resulted in an environmental disaster.

An MSNBC news spot on The Weather Channel (TWC) this morning caught my attention. Out of the blue, for no apparent reason, the news announcer informed his audience that thousands had taken to the streets in Israel this weekend to protest the high cost of living. It was, he said, the eighth week of protests there.

TWC is usually about as interested in foreign social-protest news as Sports Illustrated. In fact, street demonstrations abroad basically have to bleed if they’re going to lead in the American mainstream media. People are out demonstrating around the globe all the time, and the average American hears about it only if he frequents the right specialty websites. I couldn’t help noticing these few out-of-place sentences on Israel, because they were so unusual.

What possessed NBC-Universal properties MSNBC and TWC to feature protests in Israel in their news coverage this morning? That’s an interesting question. It is not, shall we say, made less interesting by the report of Maariv’s Kalman Libeskind, referenced by Arutz Sheva on 3 September, that American Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg orchestrated the protests in Israel’s major cities this weekend.

According to the report:

Greenberg directed the strategists to create a protest that was not led by one specific group, in order to create social ferment. An unnamed left-wing leader would eventually step into this ferment and take the reins, Greenberg predicted.

The Israeli strategists reportedly include Boaz Gaon, Moshe Gaon and Eldad Yaniv, who worked in Ehud Barak’s successful race for Prime Minister in 1999, also in cooperation with Greenberg.

Greenberg, who advised Bill Clinton on campaign strategy in the 1990s (and Al Gore and John Kerry in their campaigns), runs the Democratic strategy firm Democracy Corps with James Carville and Bob Shrum. He’s also a pollster with his own research firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. Married to Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), he gained national fame for providing living quarters for Rahm Emanuel rent-free for five years. He acquired additional notoriety for spearheading the effort to rebrand British Petroleum as the Greenest Big Oil Company in the Whole Entire Universe.

That’s the yada-yada most websites have on this today. What I haven’t seen yet is an analogy to the fascinating project undertaken by the Greenberg-Carville firm in the Bolivian presidential election in 2002, when they were known as GCS. The company was hired by incumbent president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (“Goni”) to run his reelection campaign, an essay in expeditionary politics that was captured in a documentary released in 2005 called Our Brand is Crisis.

. . . . . . . . .Given that Stanley Greenberg is one of this group’s leading lights, it should be no surprise that his approach, in enriching Israeli politics again in 2011, is to “create social ferment” so that an “unnamed left-wing leader” could step in and take the reins. The country’s falling apart, so who will the Israelis turn to? Libeskind seems to think Ehud Barak is being positioned as the turn-to guy – and given Greenberg’s connection with his 1999 campaign and the trio of Barak advisers, that doesn’t appear to be a bad guess.

Israel isn’t falling apart, of course. Commentators there have had a healthy suspicion of the organizing force behind the series of protests, which started in mid-summer with demonstrations against the high cost of housing in the major cities. In early August, Caroline Glick cited the work of Israeli bloggers in uncovering the following facts:

[A]s a handful of bloggers have shown, more than eighty percent of the protest leaders are professional far Left activists. For instance, Maariv bloggers Uri Redler and Rotem Sela researched the affiliation of all the speakers at the July 23rd rally in Tel Aviv. They found that out of 27 speakers, 21 are known leftist activists affiliated with Hadash, the communist party, with Meretz, with the New Israel Fund, with the Nationalist Left proto-party, and with the anarchists.

Redler and Sela also exposed that several “grassroots,” leaders are in fact professional political operatives affiliated with communist politicians and radical pressure groups. For instance, an activist named Tzika Bashour announced on Facebook that he would begin a general strike on August 1. Yediot Ahronot and Ynet covered his move as an authentic call of distress by an Average Joe.

The papers failed to mention that Bashour is a public relations executive who ran communist MK Dov Hanin’s campaign for the Tel Aviv mayoralty.

None of this means housing costs aren’t insane in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, or that Israelis don’t have legitimate beefs. But with a little professional spadework, the blogging community has demonstrated that the “popular protests” look a lot like the ones orchestrated by the usual-suspect organizers in the United States; i.e., “Astroturf.”

Israeli-in-the-street bloggers aren’t buying the “social justice paroxysm” theme either. Jerusalem Diaries is typical in reporting that the “protesters” out this weekend were mainly out for a nice time on a summer evening, with friends and food headlining the “protest.” The Muqata called the demonstration in Tel Aviv the city’s “biggest block party ever.” The socially-fermenting events featured well-publicized pop music and crowds snarfing down all the beer, cappuccinos, pizza, and puu-puus they could get their hands on. There are highly organized professional malcontents manning these protests, certainly, but not an enraged citizenry ready to man the barricades and go to the mattresses with the Netanyahu government.

[Greenberg has a] manipulative, media-theme-building approach to politics. . . . He doesn’t have a history of being anti-Zionist; that’s not the point here. Although he bills himself as a triangulating, “Third Way” centrist, his affiliations are very much with professional left-wing manipulators of public sentiment, and that is how he comes off in the latest instance with the protests in Israel.

To the question, “Why now? Why in the summer of 2011?” the obvious answer would be, “Because the UN vote on Palestinian statehood is coming up in September.” But I don’t assess Greenberg to be a mastermind here. He’s a hired strategist. His specialty is positioning politicians to be the turn-to guy. Something else is going on. As usual, the fact that GE-owned NBC networks are pointedly reporting faux “social ferment” as if it’s the real thing suggests a manufactured-news campaign. Rockets from Gaza aren’t the only thing coming at Israel as the UN vote nears.

UPDATING 9-8-2011The novelist David Grossman is a hero of the Israeli "Left" or anti-national camp. I personally see him as one of our very own Vichyites. Be that as it may, speaking during a book tour in Paris on the occasion of publication of one of his books in French, he showed how sneaky, cynical and sinister he is when it comes to politics. He wants the protest movement's leaders to hide their real goals until the time is ripe, perhaps for a putsch or coup d'etat. Note that our great humanitarian is eager to throw more than 500,000 Jews out of their homes. In the name of peace, of course. He also extols the value of solidarity. This obviously does not mean solidarity with Jews --especially Jews who live where he and the Arab Islamofascists and the pan-Arabists do not want them to live.Quoting from the Walla site:The Israeli writer David Grossman believes that the social protest must . . . transform into a substantial political force and leverage its public success. . ."At the moment there is a consensus among all the participants in this protest not to speak of politics. . . But I believe that soon all these marchers will become a political force because this protest cannot remain a matter of good will alone. It must become a political means that will finally ask where did the money go, where did all those billions go over the years. The answer is that most of it went to the settlements, the settlers, and the army [A FALSE CLAIM] that defends the settlements that are a distorted situation and in any event will be evacuated in a future peace accord with the Palestinians."Grossman indicated that, "Now is not a good time to speak of politics and the occupation because the moment that they start to talk about it, the support for the protest will go down by hundreds of percentage points." He added: "Finally Israelis are going out of their houses in masses, more than 400,000 [INFLATED NO.], so it's a positive thing to put differences aside because what we see here is a society that is trying to return to the values that built it, first of all the value of solidarity. . . . to take the bold step towards an accord [with the Palestinian Arabs].". . .[Grossman also stated]: "To this day, the Arabs have really not yet recognized the Jews' right to live here and maintain a state of their own. We must not forget this. Therefore, we must have a strong army."

5 Comments:

Interferring in the politics of another country is highly unethical and immoral. The article, however failed to connect the dots to the Labor party and their recent elections, whether this was in the planning while Yehud Barak was still in Labor or whether "the one to turn to" may actually be the labor party. Either way, Barak is now fighting to try to keep the military budget relevant while its Likud that is agreeing with social change.

IT WAS published in Israel that the Qadima party of the intellectually challenged Tsipi Livni helped to fund the "social protest" demos. I don't know about Labor. Do you have a source about Labor funding??

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